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Stranger Than Fiction (December Reading)
Jan. 8th, 2008 04:15 pmOnly two? December loses at life!
Crytonomicon (Neil Stephenson): reread. Total geek romance. For people who identify first as a geek, there are more important things than sex and your one true love. The more important geek thing is work that engages your brain. ( Spoilers! )
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver Sacks) is a lighthearted collection of colorful and sometimes tragic music-related brain quirks. Sacks does a lot to humanize patients he could reduce to a list of problems and neurological misfirings, which is a talent. It also means the book is somewhere between a collection of case studies and limited glimpses into the lives, which makes this a bit fluffy. If anecdotes about musicians losing their hearing or people with massive anterograde and retrograde amnesia can be considered fluffy.
2007 book stats: 65 total, 37 new fiction, 3 short story collections (including one reread), 1 graphic novel, 8 new nonfiction, 16 fiction rereads. But many of those were very short! Or, to break it down exactly as last year: 65 total, 57 fiction, 8 nonfiction.
My 2008 book resolution is to avoid romance novels unless a trusted prescreener shoves it in my hands with a bang-up rec. By "bang-up rec", I mean they indicate it's shockingly akin to a science fiction novel in drag, or deals with my favorite themes in a way counter to most romance tropes. My other 2008 book resolution is (as always) to read more nonfiction. I did slightly better this year, but the raw numbers obfuscate that I included Girl, Interrupted and The Vagina Monologues in the nonfiction count. That's pretty fluffy. Also, the non/fiction ratio's way off compared to other years.
Crytonomicon (Neil Stephenson): reread. Total geek romance. For people who identify first as a geek, there are more important things than sex and your one true love. The more important geek thing is work that engages your brain. ( Spoilers! )
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver Sacks) is a lighthearted collection of colorful and sometimes tragic music-related brain quirks. Sacks does a lot to humanize patients he could reduce to a list of problems and neurological misfirings, which is a talent. It also means the book is somewhere between a collection of case studies and limited glimpses into the lives, which makes this a bit fluffy. If anecdotes about musicians losing their hearing or people with massive anterograde and retrograde amnesia can be considered fluffy.
2007 book stats: 65 total, 37 new fiction, 3 short story collections (including one reread), 1 graphic novel, 8 new nonfiction, 16 fiction rereads. But many of those were very short! Or, to break it down exactly as last year: 65 total, 57 fiction, 8 nonfiction.
My 2008 book resolution is to avoid romance novels unless a trusted prescreener shoves it in my hands with a bang-up rec. By "bang-up rec", I mean they indicate it's shockingly akin to a science fiction novel in drag, or deals with my favorite themes in a way counter to most romance tropes. My other 2008 book resolution is (as always) to read more nonfiction. I did slightly better this year, but the raw numbers obfuscate that I included Girl, Interrupted and The Vagina Monologues in the nonfiction count. That's pretty fluffy. Also, the non/fiction ratio's way off compared to other years.